New Delhi -Regal Theatre downed its shutters

15 hours ago - Regal, one of Delhi's iconic single-screen theatres, closed down this week. But what exactly is ending with its closure?

The sense of an ending

By Trisha Gupta, Mumbai Mirror | Updated: Apr 2, 2017, 07.28 AM IST

Regal was built in 1932 as the New Delhi Premier Theatre

Regal, one of Delhi’s iconic single-screen theatres, closed down this week. But what exactly is ending with its closure?

Regal Theatre downed its shutters on Thursday. Born in 1932, as the New
Delhi Premier Theatre, the hall was the first to come up outside of
Shahjahanbad, giving New Delhi a sahabi theatre to match its status as
the newly-created capital of British India. Regal came up on property
belonging to Sir Sobha Singh, the civil contractor and builder hired to
construct much of the new city. Sobha Singh was commercially
perspicacious enough to buy up large tracts of land within the emerging
capital city, becoming known as “Addha Dilli da maalik”. He was clearly
also a man of vision.

Among a host of other buildings, Sir
Sobha gave bungalow-lined New Delhi its first apartment complex, naming
it Sujan Singh Park after his civil contractor father (and his son, the
writer and journalist, Khushwant Singh lived in one of the apartments
there until his death in March 2014). The Regal building, with its
arched porch, vaulted half-domes and pietra dura mosaic work, was
designed by the British architect Walter Sykes George, who also designed
Sujan Singh Park and St Stephen's College, among other iconic Delhi
buildings.

George and Singh conceptualised the Regal complex as
a sort of protomall, containing not just the theatre, but also a
panoply of restaurants and shops. It is not a coincidence that the
memories of watching films at Regal – of which there has been a
veritable flood in the media and on social media – are almost as much
about the eating and drinking that accompanied it. People in their
fifties, sixties and seventies remember their Regal outings alongside
the chhole-bhature at Kwality (the also-iconic restaurant in the same
corner block of Connaught Place), or continental fare at Davico's on the
top floor of the building. (Davico's was later replaced by Standard
Restaurant, where even I have eaten my share of perfect mutton cutlets,
up until the late 1990s.) In more recent years, there was the Softy
stall, tucked into a sort of alcove next to the cinema.

The
multiplex era began in Delhi in 1997, when Anupam Cinema in Saket was
bought by Ajay Bijli's PVR group and a new four-screen building built in
its stead, creating what we now know as PVR Anupam. Over the last two
decades, several of Delhi's best-loved singlescreen cinemas – Alankar in
Lajpat Nagar, Eros in Jangpura Extension, Savitri in Greater Kailash
II, not to mention Odeon, Rivoli and Plaza in Connaught Place – have
been converted into multiplexes. Others, like Chanakya or Paras or
Kamal, have not survived at all.

Regal was one of the last
singlescreen theatres that continued to function. This grand old
edifice, which started out showing Prithviraj Kapoor plays and Russian
ballet to British officers and diplomats, and to which the posher Indian
families and postcolonial grandees like Nehru and Radhakrishnan came as
a matter of course, seemed like a connection to a more genteel world.
So the last day, last show at Regal –like the closure of Chanakya in
2007 – feels like the end of a civilised age. And if you go by
everything I've just told you, it certainly is.

But what did
Regal signify in the last two or three decades? And to whom? Even as its
Connaught Place cohort of halls reinvented themselves as multiplexes
and wooed a post-liberalisation elite, Regal started to play desperately
lowbrow fare, like Chhupa Rustam in 2001 and Raam Gopal Verma Ki Aag in
2007. My own last memory of Regal is a near-traumatic one from 2003: I
cannot quite remember why, but I subjected myself to Guddu Dhanoa's
sex-horror film called Hawa, in which Tabu is raped more than once by
“the wind” — which has, of course, taken on the ghostly shape of a man.

A cinema is, after all, a business — and films like Hawawere clearly
Regal's frank attempt to put bums on seats. The management was quite
cognizant that the theatre's technical quality and comfort levels were
no longer good enough to attract the class of people who used to come to
it until the 1970s, making successes of such films as Shyam Benegal's
Nishant and Ankur, Basu Chatterjee's Rajnigandha, or melancholy
Amitabh-Jaya romances like Abhimaan or Mili. Those people had better
alternatives. The people who came to Regal were those who couldn't
afford the 200 and 300 and 400 rupee tickets that multiplexes charge –
and that Regal will no doubt charge in its new avatar.

But
those who filled up Regal's seats in recent years, keeping it afloat for
two or more decades, are not the ones being spoken to.

The
Delhi Times is filled with upper middle class people who have returned
to be present at Regal's grand farewell party, and are happy to pay Rs.
300 in black to let their mothers watch Raj Kapoor's Sangam and
reminisce about their youth. There is no mention of the hundreds,
perhaps thousands of viewers who could, until yesterday, afford to watch
a film in a Connaught Place theatre, and who have been quietly been
added to the vast masses that will now no longer be able to go to the
cinema.